Beta3 and Beta4

Anybody who reads the dot will already know, but for those who don’t (yes I mean you): KDevelop4 has released its third beta. We’ve fixed tons of bugs, added a new launch framework, new C++ features and added a whole new way of switching the perspective from code to debug and back (KDE4.3 only).

However since the tagging on the weekend a week ago, David somehow has gone crazy on fixing all kinds of mysterious (well to me at least) crashes and locks, as well as some speed improvements. Additionally Thomas McGuire – a KDevelop fan and PIMster – sat down, digged in our complex ui-library and fixed one of the most annoying bugs ever found in this still new codebase: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170863 (the one that resizes the mainwindow even in maximized mode when opening the find-bar from kate).

Hence we’ll shortly be releasing another beta (hopefully with some more fixes/improvements for valgrind, the debugger, launch framework and a new progresswidget). I don’t have any date yet as it depends on some administration stuff to be setup first, but you’ll notice when it happens 🙂

The bugs have so far always ruined KDevelop for me. I work mostly on libraries so it would be slightly less useful for me than for application programmers – I will not use KDevelop before it’s (very) reliable.
It’s a shame because otherwise KDevelop seems to be a very good IDE. The bug fixed by tmcguire is a trivial (probably) copy&paste bug, are you not embarrassed that you were not able or unwilling to fix this annoying bug for so long?
You have interesting priorities.
I really respect your great work where appropriate and don’t mean to offend you. Please focus on fixing the worst bugs at some point.

@Andreas: KDevelop3 is rock solid for C++ development and has been for the last 2 years.

Well, I cannot say about the other devs, but I’m not embarrassed at all. It was a conscious decision (by me) to concentrate on other areas as this bug was annoying but didn’t hold anybody from using the IDE. And there were and still are areas where basically nothing works (as we want it), hence we’re concentrating on these things first. Additionally this bug sounded like a layouting bug and as I know that we’re having our own layouting code and I also know how bad I am at layouting I wasn’t too eager to spend days trying to find the cause.

Last but not least: The development model we’re using here is implementing features first (without bugs if possible, but everybody does mistakes sometimes) and at some point the codebase is frozen and we’ll concentrate on bugfixing only. After that there’s a release and we restart feature development. So you can rest assured that there will be a bugfixing period before the release.

I’ve been using KDevelop4 since really early before beta1 and gone through a lot of the bugs, crashes, etc. And I’m happy right now with it. Except the little syntax highlighting disappearing if you leave a piece of code incomplete. Wish it stayed there no matter what. But yeah. I only experience one random bug crash. the rest it seems really great. I’m just waiting for the Windows port to be up to the Linux version and Python support.

I love KDevelop3 and there are a lot of interesting things KDevelop4 has to offer. However, for now KDevelop4 lacks to many key parts, like “Grep integration – regular expression search in project.”, “Project wide find and replace tool”, “Version control system: GUI support via context menu on files and directories of the project and also directly in the editor”, “Subversion: support log viewing”, “‘Find in files’, Ctags support and history navigation provide faster code navigation”
to name but a few (from KDev3_KDev4_comparison_table).
So I wait until KDevelop4 has the same “basic” functionality like KDevelop3.

Actually KDevelop4 already has find-in-files/grepview and svn/git/mercurial GUI support. So its just the find/replace and ctags that you’re missing.

Oh and history is done on a code-basis as well now via the codebrowser and related shortcuts to jumpt to last/next position. File-history also exists via Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab which orders the documents in a least-recently-used list.

C# support was started a long time ago by Jakob Petsovis (who currently doesn’t have any spare time for OSS). No idea what state the parser is in, but it has a long way to go still to be usable. So the answer is “no C# support until someone picks it up”